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Time doesn't move properly in here.

There's no clock, no window, nothing but the hum of the compressor and the slow drip of feeling coming back into my fingers and then leaving again. I've stopped trying to guess how long it's been. A few hours, maybe, though it's long enough that the cold has stopped being uncomfortable and started being something closer to permanent, like it's decided to move in.

The door opens.

She steps back in, and for a second I think it's someone else. Not because she looks different, exactly. Her coat is the same, her hands are folded the same way in front of her, nothing about her has physically changed. But there's something loose in her that wasn't there before, some fraction of a degree released from her shoulders, and I can't tell if that's good news or the kind of calm that comes right before something worse.

I already know whose name was on my screen. I saw it myself, right before she took the phone. She doesn't need to say it out loud, and she doesn't.

"Let's continue," she says, and pulls a stool out from somewhere behind the hanging meat, setting it down across from me with the care of someone laying out surgical tools. She sits, and her eyes drop once to my hands, to the way my fingers have curled in on themselves, shaking in small, involuntary twitches I can't seem to stop. She doesn't say anything about it. She simply files it away, the way she files everything, and moves on.

"The woman," she says. "Describe her. Everything. Don't leave anything out because you think it's unimportant. Let me decide what's unimportant."

"I already told you. It was dark. I was on a balcony. My leg was—"

"I know what condition your leg was in. Describe her."

So I do. Height, roughly. Voice, briefly, through a door. The shoes. The suitcase. I go over it again, slower this time, trying to squeeze new detail out of a memory that was already thin the first time I told it. She listens without writing anything down, without nodding, without giving me a single sign that any of it is landing anywhere useful.

"That's everything," I say, finally. "I'm sorry. I wish I had more."

"So do I."

There's no anger in it. That's somehow worse than if there had been. Anger would mean she still needed something from me. This just sounds like a door quietly closing.

She rises from the stool, and as she does, something small crosses her face, there and gone, a smile with no real weight behind it, the kind you'd give a stranger on the street rather than someone you're about to move against their will. Her hand lands on my shoulder for exactly as long as it takes to stand, one brief pat, and then it's gone, and so is she, already three steps toward the man in the corner.

"Get up," she says. "We're moving."

"Moving where?"

She doesn't answer. She nods once toward the man, and he steps forward and starts working at the rope around my wrists, rougher than he needs to be. I catch the look on his face while he does it, the same flat hatred from before, and I remember, a little too late, that this is the same man who spent a night tied up in a hotel bathroom because of me and Lei Mei. He hasn't forgotten either.

The moment my hands are free he hauls me up by the arm before I can try to stand on my own. My bad leg buckles, and I go down hard, the cast cracking against the concrete floor with a sound that turns my stomach before the pain even catches up to it. He doesn't wait for me to recover. He just drags me back up by the arm and keeps walking, my good foot scrambling to find the ground, my cast half-dragging behind me the whole way, while I hiss through my teeth and neither of them so much as glances at me.

"You knew this would happen," I say, mostly to myself, mostly just to hear something other than the compressor. "Didn't you. This whole time."

She's already walking toward the far door, the one I haven't seen used yet, tucked between two racks of shelving at the back of the room.

"I calculated it was likely," she says, without turning around. "She's resourceful. She would find this address eventually. I simply didn't expect eventually to be quite so soon."

The back door swings open onto a short concrete ramp, and after hours under nothing but a single bare bulb, the daylight hits me like a slap. I flinch, eyes slamming shut on reflex, and for a second all I have is the cold air on my face and the sound of my own feet scraping uselessly against concrete. When I force my eyes open again everything is white and edgeless, the loading dock nothing but a smear of grey and glare, until it slowly resolves into shape: a truck backed up against the dock, its rear doors already open, dark and waiting.

They drag me toward it, one man gripping each arm, my feet barely finding the ground between them, my cast knocking against every uneven seam in the concrete the whole way.

That's when I hear it.

Somewhere back through the cold room, past the hooks and the shelving and the door we just came through, voices are rising. A staff member, sharp and insistent, telling someone they can't come in here, this is a staff area, you need to leave. And underneath it, cutting through, a second voice, quieter but not backing down, asking where he is.

I don't need to make out a single word to know exactly whose voice that is.

She doesn't stop walking. She doesn't even look back toward the noise. If anything, her pace picks up, unhurried but exact, like someone closing a shop five minutes before a customer reaches the door.

"In," one of the men mutters, and hands shove me up into the dark of the truck.

The doors swing shut behind me, and the last thing I hear before the latch drops is the sound of that second voice, still arguing, still getting closer, and still, somehow, too far away.